Laundry is complicated and you never really know just how complicated it is until your mom isn’t doing it. It’s more than just about separating your colored clothes from the white ones. Clothes haves needs and Laundry Day – Care Symbol Reader is the closest you’ll get to having a laundry whisperer at your disposal. It’s a $0.99 app for iOS that reads the laundry symbols on clothing tags and tells you exactly what they mean. The app is a genius QR code reader except it’s meant to make sense of those symbols you ignore when you wash your clothes. The app has a ‘scan’ mode that you can use to live scan tags and a ‘look up’ mode that lets you manually select wash and care symbols to find out what they mean.

Open the app and allow it to access your camera. Point it to a tag and wait as the symbols are detected. Tap a detected symbol to find out what it means. If the app fails to read the symbols, something that might happen if the tags are worn out, tap ‘All Symbols’ at the bottom to switch the app’s index of washing symbols. Tap any one of them to view what they mean.

The symbols are explained simply and with a few ‘extra tips’ for washing and ironing.

Stuff like this is why technology was invented. This app is quite possibly one of the most useful ones I’ve ever come across. You’ll never get laundry wrong and you’ll never have to second guess what’s the best way to wash an item. You don’t even need Google anymore to tell you what’s best for your clothes.